Venom

Can you smell that? It’s the sweet, sweet American air (and packing peanuts) unleashed by this massive haul of new comics from my December order.

The unboxing starts with a new volume of our beloved Lumberjanes, includes a pair of classic Venom collections, a pair of new Marvel Epic Collections, the penultimate TPB of Letter 44, new Injection, old Cable, new Youngblood, and…

…something I’ll be digging into in the next episode of Crushing Comics!

That’s due to catching up with another Marvel book (Thanos), several new indie #1s, and a few Image books I’ve read to the present in the past few weeks. Also, starting this week I’m running very short reviews of the X-Men books covered in This Week in X here, so that you can catch up on all the week’s new titles in one place!

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Guides launched with the support of Patrons and now available to all readers: 22 Guides!

Today I’m taking a slightly different perspective than I did for 1998 to 2008 and 2008 to present. For those installments, I focused on runs I knew well or at least could recommend from context. However, when it comes to runs I’ve read, the 90s are pretty thoroughly covered over both by existing omnibuses and the current votes of the poll. Add to that how much of this period are covered by the end of runs from the 80s, that I’ve already mapped X-Men, and my temporary avoidance of exhaustively mapping Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and the pickings wind up being pretty slim!

Thus, this list comes with a caveat – I’m not necessarily suggesting you run out and buy and read all of these runs right now. I mean, I own nearly all of them, and even having not read them cover to cover I can tell you that most of them are very 90s comic books.

However, they also represent under-collected material that’s relatively unknown to modern readers. While it might be more reasonable to see all of it covered with Epic Collections, I think it would be more expedient to see them collected in this format than to wait around for trade paperbacks.

Each year, a mysterious and intrepid comic book fan known only as Tigereyes reaches out to some of the biggest collected editions communities on the web to ask them a single question: What are the top 10 Marvel Omnibuses you’d most like to buy?

While we only get to see the top 50 or so results of the survey each year, based on the number of voters it’s entirely possible that there are over ten times that many omnibuses nominated by voters. The long tail of the survey would make not only for interesting analysis, but terrific rainy-day reading.

To help inspire that long tail as well as your own rainy day reads, I’m covering dozens of Marvel runs that would make for terrific omnibuses. For the past four days I highlighted every potential missing X-Men omnibus from 1963 to 2015. Now, I’m going to stroll backwards through time to look at the rest of Marvel, starting with their newest comic runs released from 2012 to present.

The fact that these books aren’t currently omnibuses (and may never be) doesn’t have to stop you from sampling them – even if you’ve never read a comic before in your life! Each one is a terrific self-contained comic experience that can be enjoyed without any crossovers or companion series.

Today we’ll examine a pair of late-80s classics by a single writer and one modern-day epic that was at both highly enjoyable and fundamentally broken.

Why just three books? Other than my fingers being a little exhausted, I wanted to have the time to dig a little deeper both into the content of the books and how they might be collected. This three-omnibus installment wound up being just as long as some of the posts with twice the books!

Marvel has released these oversized omnibus editions for over a decade now, with a staggering amount of their most-popular material now covered in the format – from Silver Age debuts to modern classics. Is your favorite character or run of issues already in an Omnibus? My Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is the most comprehensive tool on the web for answering that question – it features every book, plus release dates, contents, and even breakdowns of $/page and what movies the books were released to support.

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